Adobe Photoshop CS6 Extended in Review

Product Review:
Adobe Photoshop CS6 Extended

If it was a disease it would be an epidemic. Adobe Photoshop is the de facto image editing
standard for professional graphics world wide. Go to a visual
effects boutique in Newport Beach or a run-down garage in the
Midwest, and what's on the monitor? Photoshop. It's mentioned
beneath more Exposé images than any other software. In a
moment, we'll see why it continues to be so popular.

It was like having a complete graphics studio in a box. This
review focuses on Photoshop CS6 Extended, as well as some of the
features available in Photoshop CS6. There's a lot of new features
so, unfortunately, as a reviewer I have to play roulette with the
"what's new" document and pick out just a few to cover.
There are way too many cool new features for any single review to
encompass. Enough intro - let's rock!

New Look - Same Great Taste

Photoshop is starting to look more like other high end software
packages that use what I like to call "the colors," i.e.
muted dark grays. Users can now choose between four color themes
via Edit -> Preferences -> Interface. You can stick with the
old-school gray or pick anything from almost white to almost
black.

Naturally, I chose almost black. I much prefer the dark UI as
there is less distracting brightness that surrounds whatever I'm
working on. It makes your images pop and lets you focus on pixels,
not buttons and menu bars. Regardless, they're all pretty slick. So
is this screen shot I made to show them all off :)

That's the good news. The bad news is that while the new color
themes look cool, they aren't implemented uniformly throughout the
software. For example, most menus and floating windows will not be
affected by your choice of color themes. Instead, these are
controlled by your window manager, i.e. operating system level
window themes.

On systems with generally crappy out of the box support for
custom window themes (i.e. Microsoft Windows) this is
disappointing. What you're left with is kind of a vitiligo version
of Photoshop. You can try and find a Window theme that sort of
matches your choice of Photoshop colors, but this kind of nonsense
shouldn't be necessary:

I'm not sure whether to blame Adobe or Microsoft for the
injustice, but it's all ridiculous and we'll leave it at that.
Moving on.

Mercury Graphics Engine

The MGE as they call it, I think will be the biggest boon to
Photoshop CS6 users, especially those who deal with very large
images. The best part is that it's automatic. If you have a
supported GPU (see the NVIDIA link at the bottom of this page),
Photoshop CS6 will take advantage of it. Let's digress for a moment
to see exactly what the MGE is and why it is important.

Hardware designs, superscalar architectures, instruction level
parallelism - all of that nonsense aside - a CPU is not an ideal
solution for most graphics workloads. To dramatically simplify
things: Most CPUs execute a single thread of instructions.
Point is, that fancy super-mega multi-core CPU you got last year,
generally supports only one thread of instructions per core at any
given time. While those threads are executed really fast,
they're still not ideal. This brings us to...

Embarrassingly parallel problems. It's a term used by computer
science professionals to describe problems which are trivial to
break up into smaller pieces and compute each piece in parallel.
E.g: if the value of pixel A doesn't directly depend on the value
of pixel B, we could compute the value of each on a
separate computing core. Thus, it would be great if we had
lots of computing cores just laying around even if, taken
individually, they were slower than our CPU. Apparently a bunch of
really smart people thought so too and, around 1999, NVIDIA birthed
the Graphics Processing Unit (GPU).

The GPU found on modern graphics cards often have
several hundred computing cores. For example, the NVIDIA Quadro 5000 I used for this review has 352
cores. Any single core is much slower than my CPU, but together
they form an army of computational beat-down. And while GPU
programming used to be a mysterious black art, this is no longer
the case, thanks to advances in programming libraries like NVIDIA
CUDA and OpenCL. These make it easy(er) for application
programmers, like the people who wrote Photoshop, to tap into the
GPU and execute general purpose instructions. The result?

Speed. Any function that has been written to take advantage of
your GPU will be much faster, often by orders of
magnitude. This is what Adobe's Mercury Graphics Engine (MGE) is
all about: harnessing the parallelism of the GPU for embarrassingly
parallel problems. The real question is does it live up to the
hype?

For tools written to take advantage of it, the answer is a
resounding yes. You'll see a vast improvement in performance. Other
tools not written specifically for MGE show no performance gain,
just as expected. That said, Photoshop isn't going to suddenly
become a mystical beast that shoots greased lightning from its
finger tips just because you have a beefy graphics card. Some
specific tools found within Photoshop CS6, however, will. Examples
include Liquify, Warp, Lighting Effects and the Oil Paint filter,
among others. On compatible hardware, like the NVIDIA Quadro 5000 I used for this review, I can
affirm that these tools indeed perform much faster.

Need to liquify a 21,000 pixel wide image? Go for it. When I
liquified the image shown here, I had no perceivable slowdown. Even
when I used brush sizes of of 10,000 pixels or more, everything
remained as smooth as a well greased - well, as smooth as butter
anyway. The most important tools making use of this new GPU
acceleration, however, are actually among the least exciting.

Pan and zoom. Yes, of all the fascinating new tools and features
found in Photoshop CS6 that Adobe stands so proudly beside, I'm
pushing the pan and zoom tools. Ridiculous, I know, but I'm
serious: Once you've experienced the fluid zoom in and out, not in
discreet steps, but in a continuous fluid range simply by holding
and scrubbing the zoom cursor - you'll never go back (unless you
use the liquify window, in which case the scrubby zoom is not yet
implemented). I know what you're thinking - the scrubby zoom isn't
exactly new and you're right, but the added performance of the MGE
makes it significantly faster.

As an example, on another project I had to stitch together an
elevation map I was using for a terrain displacement. It was in
geoTIFF format at 32-bits per-pixel, courtesy United States
Geological Survey. The final texture was 16,204 x 15,651 pixels. It
describes a region of about 100 square miles of the northern
Rockies. That's about 254 megapixels of data. In previous versions
of Photoshop, even moving around the image was a slow process. With
the new MGE this is no longer the case.

Unfortunately, the actual terrain that resulted from using that
displacement texture was generated in Maya. Photoshop and 32-bit
per-pixel images are still not on the best of terms. Granted,
32-bit displacements do work, but 254 megapixels of displacement on
a postcard was asking a little too much. Manipulating the texture
that produced the terrain, however, was much faster.

When dealing with files of ridiculous dimensions, they're no
longer sluggish, oversized monsters. You can now pan, zoom, liquify
and transform them with gusto. For this, I applaud Adobe. It makes
Photoshop about the most responsive image editing software out
there. Dealing with enormous images was once an exercise in
patience. It is now a genuine pleasure. However, the images had
best not be 32-bits per pixel or doom will smite thee. More on that
later. For now...

New and Improved 3D

Go 3D! The 3D features have been completely re-worked. They're
now integrated directly into the canvas workspace. You get the
usual on-screen 3D widgets for translate, rotate, scale and so on.
You get camera controls, lights, shadows, materials, reflections,
refractions, bump maps, textures, specular highlights, environment
textures, image based lighting, text extrusions and
bevels, displacements - even editing 3D text after it's been
3D-ified is now possible. You now have everything you need to go
3D.

Photoshop's answer to 3D targets users wanting to make web,
print graphics, logos and the like with the added 3D impact, but
without having to spend thousands of dollars on dedicated 3D
software. Matte painters and texture artists alike will love it. In
fact, I can't think of anybody who won't.

While you can do some pretty impressive extrusions and
deformations in Photoshop CS6 Extended, don't count on it to help
you sculpt your next character, or model your next architectural
masterpiece anytime soon. I grant amnesty to Adobe simply because,
quite frankly, that's not what the tools were designed for.

What you can do, is import 3D content in popular
formats such as OBJ and incorporate them with the 2D tools you
already know and love. The guitar shown here was imported as an
OBJ, rendered in Photoshop CS6 Extended, and then filtered and
painted over. The on-image controls in the screen shot are part of
the new Field Blur, which allows users to define multiple points in
an image and have the blur interpolate between them:

While it was nice to be able to toss a fully textured OBJ back
and forth from Photoshop to Maya, one irritation I did find, was
that when I exported the current layer as an OBJ, Photoshop
re-saved new copies of all textures. This happens each
time you export an OBJ, even if the textures were never edited.
That is, there's no attempt to simply reference the existing
on-disk files. This happens even when you click 'cancel,' upon
being presented with a choice of texture output formats. Textures
are saved, generating new files, taking up more disk space -
whether you like it or not. Users working on network file servers
with filesystem level deduplication won't have a problem with this,
but unfortunately that's not most users. That, and it makes for a
lot of clutter.

The other thing that took some getting used to was less of a
gripe and more of a pleasant surprise. It was the fact that each
layer can be its own 3D scene with its own independent lights,
camera and so on. I guess it should have been obvious, and
navigation of the scenes was certainly no problem, but it was the
concept that I had to get used to. It was almost the complete
opposite of what I was accustomed to with programs like Maya, where
you work in a single, unified 3D scene. I'm pleased to say that
users should have no problems with this once they wrap their heads
around it.

Here's another shot of the field blur in action. This time,
several points are defined with a blur value of zero to effectively
prevent the central strip of the Milky Way from being blurred. You
could do this with a mask, but now you don't have to:

Rendering

Like most 3D programs, what you see is not what you
get. Photoshop CS6 Extended is no exception. While the interactive
3D view is pretty good, you still have to click 'render' and refill
your coffee before you get to see the final high quality result. In
itself, this is nothing new. The bad news, however, is that the
render times in Photoshop CS6 Extended aren't so great. They're not
atrocious, but they're not great (dependent on canvas size and
quality settings, of course... and greatly depending on what
other rendering engines you're accustomed to).

Getting the final image can take a while. The render appears to
be a multi-threaded software render, but it doesn't appear to be
spatially adaptive ( i.e., areas of empty canvas took just as long
to render as areas containing 3D elements). Still, one must bear in
mind that Photoshop is a relative newcomer compared to many of the
other 3D veterans on the market, so we must grant Adobe at least
some slack in this regard; optimizations come with time. When the
render finally did complete, the quality was excellent:

It should be noted that I'm completely and totally spoiled
rotten in respect to 3D software. I've been lucky enough to test
drive tools that cost more than my house. Thus, it is with both
great sorrow and great pride that I say this: The best 3D text
tools on the market exist in Photoshop CS6 Extended. The speed and
ease of making, tweaking, refining and formatting complex text
extrusions is unmatched. The new text formatting tools only add to
this.

Content-Aware Move

The Content-Aware Move tool has two modes: Move and Extend. The
idea behind Extend is that you can seamlessly replicate an object
to accomplish tasks such as making a building taller, or a
panoramic slightly wider, etc.

The Content-Aware Move tool, covered here, is a tool that
permits users to make a rough selection of an object and move it to
a new location. Photoshop CS6 will then attempt to seamlessly fill
the hole that would otherwise remain. It also tries to blend the
moved object into its new surroundings. This is done with more than
a naive transparency blending: the Content-Aware algorithms
actually look for similar pixels and attempt to make an educated
guess as to the best pixels to use as blend and fill. So, the
question is: how well does it work?

After playing with the Content-Aware Move tool, I was both
impressed and disappointed. It works pretty slick, as long as the
object you're trying to move or extend is fairly contrast-isolated
from its surroundings. By that, I mean a building against a blue
sky, or a pebble on a relatively featureless beach, or a person
standing in front of a nondescript wall, etc. The tool is basically
akin to a (somewhat) smart blending tool combined with a
Content-Aware fill:

What it doesn't do (and God how I wish it did), is take
into account actual features present in the image. There's no
attempt to adjust for perspective shifts or lens distortions as the
result of the move - there's no scale invariant feature
transformation algorithms at work here or any other brand of black
magic.

In fact, I was a little disappointed with it in some ways, not
because it sucks - it certainly doesn't - but because it was hyped
far beyond its abilities. It only ever works "like magic"
in carefully chosen, often contrived example images. In real
images, under non-ideal situations, it sometimes works and
sometimes needs a little extra help:

Make a selection. The more breathing room you leave around your
object the better. In the example shown here I could have had
slightly better results, had I left more space between my selection
and my object. Finally, select the Content-Aware Move tool and set
it to 'Move' mode and drag the bird to the left. You can play
around with several 'Adaptations,' which determine how much slack
Photoshop is granted in trying to make a seamless transition:

The result isn't a bad starting point for further refinement
with a patch tool, but it's no Houdini:

Content-Aware Move is a good tool if you know when and where to
use it. In some situations, it can save a lot of time, but in
others it's no better than using a Patch tool or a Clone Brush.
Your mileage may vary, but for the amount of time it can
potentially save in the situations where it does excel, it's worth
a shot. It will be interesting to see where Adobe takes
Content-Aware tools in future versions of Photoshop.

Video

The video interface has been completely re-worked as well. While
it's no competitor to a more dedicated video solution such as Adobe
Premiere Pro, it does provide all the tools videographers and
webcast artists need to get started. It's also pretty handy for
frame doctoring with all the tools you're already familiar with.
Almost any tool in Photoshop can be used to edit frames of video.
Need a healing brush or a curve adjustment? You can use those, or
pretty much any other tool you're used to:

Applying image filters to videos produces some unique results,
but the real boon will be frame-by-frame retouching and layer based
color corrections. It's also good for quickly blocking out video
projects. Basic keyframes and interpolations or 'tweens' are also
supported. You can even make simple keyframe animations.

Background Saving and Crash Recovery

The new background saving and crash recover features are like
your own personal life preserver. In the event that Photoshop, or
anything in the software stack below it crashes (such as the
operating system), Photoshop CS6 has your back. Upon re-launching,
the program will open up the recovery files, i.e. the backup
version of your image that Photoshop automatically saves every few
minutes (every 10 minutes by default, but you can configure the
frequency in the preferences window).

I'm glad to say this feature has no affect on the original
document, i.e. it won't ever clobber a deliberately unsaved
experiment. This shouldn't be confused with an unsaved document.
The auto-save and recovery feature does work even on
images that have not been saved at all: Those 'Untitled-' files you
have lying around - they're protected too.

I hadn't originally intended on testing this feature, but, by
happenstance, I killed the Photoshop process in the task manager
one morning. I restarted Photoshop and was pleased to see that the
unsaved screen shot I had been working re-appeared just as I'd left
it:

Good feature :)

Things I'd Love to See

How could Photoshop be even better? There are some limits on
what can be done with images of 32-bits per pixel. I would like to
see future versions boast further support for these high bit depth
formats. Doing so would open up a new realm for HDR photographers -
more than just tone mapping. It would also be a boon to film and
cinematic artists working with huge, high bit depth data sets.
That, and I would love to see even more tools take advantage of the
new MGE. In my humble opinion, it's the most unseen, yet coolest
feature of them all.

Final Words

It's Photoshop. Despite Adobe's sincerest efforts to guard their
trademark, the word itself has almost become synonymous with,
"something amazing." I don't see this changing anytime
soon. With the new tools outlined here, plus all the ones I didn't
have time to cover, I can say with confidence this version is
deserving of the name. If you were sitting on the fence about
upgrading before, this version should be all the encouragement you
need. Loss-less crop tools, new content-aware tools, including
patch and move, completely re-worked 3D and re-worked video, new
blurs, advanced text formatting, the new MGE... the list goes on. I
could write an epic about Photoshop CS6 and Photoshop CS6 Extended,
but I'll spare you some time.

All supporting images are copyright, and
cannot be
copied, printed, or reproduced in any manner without written
permission

Kurt Foster (Modulok) falls somewhere between
programmer and visual effects artist. When not sifting through
technical manuals, he takes on freelance roles in both programming
and visual effects, attempting to create a marriage of technical
knowledge with artistic talent. He can be seen helping out on the
Renderosity Maya forum, when time permits.

August 27, 2012

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